This promotional photo shows wristbands that Starbucks is giving to customers who donate $5 or more to the Opportunity Finance Network. (AP Photo/Starbucks)

(Newser)
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When Joe Nocera heard about Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s plan to turn Starbucks customers’ donations into job-creating microloans, he had one thought: “God bless him,” he writes in the New York Times. Sure the government should be tackling this jobs problem, “but with an election coming up, nothing of the sort is likely.” So Schultz took matters into his own hands and had an inspired idea: Using Starbucks’ sheer size to create something like the microloan programs it helps run in coffee-producing countries.

The best part? Customers’ donations won’t just be loaned out, they’ll become capital for “Community Development Financial Institutions,” a group of mostly nonprofit lenders working in underserved communities. They can then leverage that equity 7-to-1, an executive involved tells Nocera—meaning your $5 turns into $35 worth of cash for a job creating business. “With the government and banks unwilling or unable, it’s time we took matters into our own hands,” Nocera argues. “At this point, who else can we count on?”

"They can then leverage that equity 7-to-1...meaning your $5 turns into $35 worth of cash for a job creating business..." Wow!!! http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lr0s3rRNC81qzsptdo1_500.jpg

Dave99

Oct 18, 2011 12:51 PM CDT

No the best hope is to do the same thing we did before to bring about "The Great Compression" ( see Krugmans brilliant writing about this ). The Great Compression was that time around the late 30's to the early 40's when big government passed a lot of legislation to redistribute wealth from rich to non-rich and it worked like a charm. If you look at the actually data you can see that the rich got poorer and the poor got richer during that time all thanks to big government. This gave birth to a massive middle-class. So you can see why cons hate big government. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/ (see graph)